Nick Giunta Blog Post #3

 In class, we watched a movie called "Eighth Grade" about an eighth-grader named 'Kayla' who was trying to fit in with her other classmates. This movie is about Kayla's constant efforts to fit in with the cool girls in her class but due to her confidence early on she never got accepted. It takes us through the struggles of being a teenager, especially in a heavily dependent social media society. As Kayla scrolls through social media and other platforms, she notices pictures of other girls looking a certain way, making her jealous and less confident in how she looks. This transforms into how confident she is in person, which ultimately leads to her not being accepted by her desired friend group. In the lectures, Nancy Baym's four theoretical perspectives on the causal relationship between technology and the social help us understand Kayla's anxieties. One of the four, in particular, is technological determinism, which is the idea of how technology affects our lives within society. The more time spent on technology, specifically social media the more influence we get from sources within social media that try to shape who we have to be in order to fit in. Kayla experiences this firsthand as she experiments with different changes in herself as she feels like that is the only way she will fit in. Once teenagers realize that what they see on social media is not the entire reality the more they can understand that being themselves is good enough for society. 


 

Comments

  1. Colby HarrisonOctober 24, 2022 at 10:59 AM

    Thanks for the post Nick, it was a good read. You make a great point about the disconnect from the world we see through social media and actual reality. This factor leads to disassociation among many of social media users and something we see in Kayla. She is one person at home, making her videos yet a completely different person, a shell of her true self once placed in public. This is a direct effect of social media. Presenting the world as a pretty place with nice people and where everyone is happy but reality is anything but that and Kayla struggles to discern that. Thanks for sharing Nick!

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